Writing Workshop with Annaliese Jakimides

Description

Award-winning writer Annaliese Jakimides will teach a writing workshop at the Wendell Gilley Museum on Saturday, Feb. 11 from 9am to noon. This workshop is designed to help you unlock your creativity and leave with some works in progress—and to have some fun along the way. Get inspired by pieces from the museum’s permanent collection, and a new winter exhibition featuring sculpture by Rebekah Raye, woodblock prints by Andrea Rich, linocuts by Sherrie York, and pieces from “The Birds of Mount Desert Island” by Carroll Sargent Tyson. This event is in person and costs $20 for museum members and $25 non-members. Space is limited and registration is required. Sign up at  www.wendellgilleymuseum.org/events.

Jakimides will provide some background about this type of writing — ekphrastic writing — plus techniques, and prompts to get you going. But ultimately you choose your path. Ekphrastic writing can be analytical, deep and playful — but more than anything, Jakimedes notes, “it provides an endless stream of possible entries into writing.” “I love the way ekphrastic writing opens doors I didn’t see,” she says.

Participants will write a few short pieces, and have opportunities to read their work (without the pressure to do so.) Each will leave with “handouts, ideas, rough starts, and, likely, new work,” having learned how to find, and open, these special doors. The workshop is open to prose and poetry writers.

Winner of the Acadia Prize in Poetry, Jakimides has over five hundred publications under her belt and multiple Pushcart Prize nominations. She’s been named a finalist for the Maine Literary Awards in both Poetry and Nonfiction—multiple times for each one—as well as for the Stephen Dunn Poetry Prize. She grew up in inner-city Boston and raised a family in northern Maine, growing almost all their food and pumping water by hand.

She currently lives in an apartment overlooking the copper dome of the Bangor Public Library. In addition to working with urban environmental justice organizations and international arts groups, she has developed humanities programs for schools and discussed life through the lens of children’s literature in a variety of settings, including prisons, community centers, and libraries. Cited in national competitions, her poetry and prose have been included in many journals and anthologies, and broadcast on Maine Public and National Public Radio. Jakimides’s most recent publication is the essay “I Tell Henry the Plate Is Red,” in the anthology Breaking Bread (Beacon Press, 2022).